Twenty years ago today, as throngs of New Yorkers were sunning themselves in Washington Square Park on the first warm day of spring, a 1987 Oldsmobile zoomed down Washington Place, gunned through the stop sign at Greene Street, plowed across the sidewalk at Washington Square East and smashed into the park. When the car finally came to rest against a couple of benches near the center of the park, five people lay dead or dying. Twenty-seven people were injured, some of them grievously.

The Washington Square Massacre, as the incident came to be known, left deep marks on NYC transportation advocacy. Members of Transportation Alternatives and Auto-Free NY had already been sounding the alarm over “off-road” pedestrian fatalities, such as that of 7-year-old Gavin Cato in Crown Heights the previous August, and were campaigning for car-free zones in Greenwich Village, including the very stretch of Washington Place that had served as the launching pad for the killer Olds. The carnage in Washington Square Park spurred us to redouble our efforts and laid the ground for the street memorials that fostered citywide awareness of endangerment of pedestrians and cyclists, several years later.

Another of those affected was Gail Collins, now a New York Times columnist but then a writer for Newsday. Collins had already decried sidewalk killings, do-nothing DAs, the “rule of two,” and windshield-privileged legislators who “drive a great deal more than they walk [and] pass laws in their own image.” On April 24, 1992, the day after the massacre, she published her classic broadside, “Pedestrians Losing the Battle.” Here are some excerpts (sadly, Collins’ Newsday columns are not available online):

We are not safe from cars anyplace, people. Not on the sidewalk, not on your front lawn.

Two weeks ago it was a blind man and his dog on Fifth Avenue. Before that, a woman walking her kids to school, and a pregnant teenager in Brooklyn. Before that, a mentally handicapped woman on her way to work in Queens. All of them hit by cars while standing on the sidewalk.

In a city this full of pedestrians, the automobile should always be on the defensive, treading carefully. But instead, the cars seem to be in charge. They can go anywhere, do anything.

When it comes to cars, New York City is wide open. Virtually nobody who speeds or runs a red light gets a ticket.

We need a level playing field between people and cars.

Twenty years later, it’s tempting to feel that nothing has changed — particularly in the wake of the three-car smash-up on Saturday night near Bryant Park in which a speeding Jaguar somersaulted onto the sidewalk, injuring four pedestrians in addition to six vehicle passengers.

That would be a mistake. NYC pedestrian fatalities have fallen by 50 percent from their early-1990s levels — with sidewalk killings apparently down at around the same rate, from a dozen a year (PDF, see pp. 37-38) to half-a-dozen.

Who, or what, deserves the credit for this impressive drop? Improved trauma response and greater sobriety have played a part, but the civic culture in which driving takes place has been changing as well. The meme of driver superiority and pedestrian inferiority appears to be losing ground, as can be seen in drivers’ greater willingness to observe pedestrians’ right-of-way before turning at crosswalks, and, one presumes, a corresponding drop in such collisions. More recently, streets throughout the five boroughs have begun to be re-engineered in the direction of Collins’ level playing field, further advancing safety.

Hearteningly, the political intelligentsia may finally be warming to livable streets, not just as an abstraction but even when it means taking actual space from cars. Fresh evidence of this may appear as soon as the end of this week, when an article in the right-leaning Manhattan Institute’s City Journal delivers a ringing endorsement of Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s and DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan’s “transportation reforms [that] have unclogged New York’s streets and made them safer.”

The driver of the ’87 Olds, 74-year-old Yonkers resident Stella Maychick, who had slid over from the passenger seat after her daughter Diana drove them to Washington Place, died eight years ago. In 2010, the daughter, now Diana Foote, a food writer for a Florida paper, published a classic “you-a culpa” about “that beautiful spring day when my own mother’s car just wouldn’t stop.” In Foote’s telling, a mysterious manufacturing defect called “sudden acceleration” was to blame — rather than her or her mother’s failure to adjust seat distance and height before taking off from the curb, which could have led the shorter Ms. Maychick to mistake the accelerator for the brake.

Back in the present, two days after the Jag driver set off a chain of collisions that sent eight people to the hospital, the police are still singing their familiar refrain. According to the Post, “No criminality was suspected, but the investigation is ongoing.”

Thanks for posting this Charles! A very important reminder. The fact that drivers are never retested as their skills naturally deminish in old age is a travesty.

http://newyorkbike.com/ Richard Rosenthal

When a collision is preventable by a driver’s taking (greater) care and acting responsibly, there must be some word other than “accident” to describe it. Let’s fashion that word.

Yet again do I preach: cars don’t kill; they don’t have a mind of their own. Drivers kill. Let’s say it: Killed by driver. Killed by (insert driver’s name). “Peter Pedestrian was killed by Don Driver as he and his wife, Pauline, were walking on the sidewalk at (location). Pauline was critically injured in the collision [NOT ACCIDENT] and is likely to lose her legs….”.Let’s start using language more precisely and maybe that’ll have an effect on people’s judgments and assignment of responsibility.

Summary: If it was preventable, it wasn’t an accident.

That said, terrific article—as ususual, Charlie.

Josef S.

A great reminder for those of us who weren’t there to experience this pivotal moment. A tragedy we have to relive far too often.

KillMoto

@59d5f246d3deffc7925a32f8bc645d80:disqus , great points!
I would call something like that Jaguar story a “negligent”, a collision where say the wheels fall off a car due to (foreseeable) bad maintenance a “preventable”, and incidents where there is simply not enough information a “collision”.

I also would suggest We the People pass a new law, “Operating a motor vehicle, death resulting.” Motive – and actual awareness that the driver killed someone – is not a required element of the crime. Make the prison and dollar fine optional, but require mandatory loss of license for the culpable no less than a year. Such a law would do at least a little something to take reckless drivers off the streets.

JK

The Washington Square massacre took place during an era of vehicular mayhem and lawlessness which included drag racing drivers killing cyclists in the East Village, a cyclist being dragged for blocks in Washington Heights, and an ongoing pedestrian horror on Queens Boulevard. At that time driving with a suspended or revoked drivers license was decriminalized and a large share of motorists were driving with no license. It was a true low point and was the beginning of a huge turnaround in NYC street safety — which Charlie Komanoff should take some credit for.

Within a few years after Washington Square, state laws on driving without a license were significantly tightened, and the NYPD began TrafficStat and much more effective enforcement. DOT also took notice and began methodically reengineering the worst locations. By the time the revolutionary administration of Janette Sadik-Khan came in, pedestrian deaths and injuries had already fallen significantly. This progress was spurred by relentless advocacy by Transportation Alternatives, and Charlie’s research, which exploited outrage in the tabloid press to begin shifting public and political attitudes.

Anonymous

@305d3b6f6091f854b4e345fd551a93e7:disqus Thanks JK. The livable streets community that you too have been an integral part of has indeed wrought powerful changes. The job now is to build on them and institutionalize them. It’s a big job, but we’re a big community!

http://gruber-law.com/ one call that’s all

I heard about this from my father that in the past the Washington streets will be crash because of the heavy earthquake.

Tamara Molina

Carlos Oyola was my boyfriend at that time… He is greatly missed. After 20 years, I still think of him DAILY !!!! I do feel after a certain age, elderly should be re-tested! I think its ok for them to drive, just retest! I am still in touch with the Oyola family, as they do a memorial at NYU annually, which we all go to. Carlos, you are loved and still missed… your “Cuchita”… Tamara (Molina)